Google Chrome: The Unlikely Memory Hog?
For years, Google Chrome has been the subject of jokes and criticism in the web development industry. Many believed that Chrome was the culprit behind excessive memory usage and disk writing on computers. However, recent testing revealed that this issue may not be entirely Chrome's fault.
In fact, our tests showed that Chrome was writing or caching a significant amount of data to the SSD when streaming video. This behavior was not seen in Safari and Edge browsers. While some users may have inadvertently downloaded the Intel version of Chrome by mistake, which can lead to increased disk writing, this is unlikely to be the primary cause of the issue.
The problem persists even if you're not a Chrome user. A subscriber of our channel, Ian Gao, reached out with a discovery that he made about his 16GB M1 Mac Mini with a 512GB SSD. Despite using Mac OS 11.5, Ian was still seeing "Ludicrous Mode" disk writing activity, with an astonishing 136 terabytes written to date. This is not just a Chrome issue; it's a more widespread problem that affects various browsers and apps.
Ian investigated further and discovered something called nwjs helper in his Activity Monitor. This is a package of tools necessary for apps built using the NW.js JavaScript framework. The renderer process attached to this was consuming 29GB of RAM, which is excessive, especially considering Ian's machine has only 16GB of RAM. It's no surprise that some of this memory usage is being written to the SSD.
The nwjs helper process raises an interesting question: are the embedded code and libraries used in apps optimized for M1? Ian dug deeper and found that while some apps may be Apple Silicon-optimized, others rely on third-party libraries that are not. This can lead to processes like the one we discussed being launched, consuming RAM, and resulting in excessive disk writing.
The main culprit behind this issue is likely a combination of factors, including the translation process by Rosetta and the use of Intel-based binaries for third-party libraries. As these individual apps are rewritten for Apple Silicon, the problem should largely disappear.
Fortunately, our tests suggest that the SSDs in M1 Macs are robust and can handle the swap activity generated by these processes without significant issues. In fact, Ian's SSD is only 5% worn, and it still has all its available spare capacity. An SSD does not fail immediately when it reaches 100% usage; the actual expectancy can be considerably more.
In conclusion, while there has indeed been an issue with excessive disk writing on M1 Macs, the vast majority of users will not experience this problem. The software tools are reporting correctly, and Apple's design of the M1 chip is well-suited to handle these swap activities. To minimize any potential risks, it's essential to keep your M1 Mac up-to-date with the latest version of macOS and monitor disk usage.
As a parting shot, our advice remains to enjoy your brilliant M1 computer without worrying about this issue too much. After all, time seems to be bearing out that these concerns are relatively minor. We'll continue to monitor this situation and provide updates as necessary. Thank you for watching, and we'll see you next time for more geekery!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enback in february of 2021 m1 mac users started to notice what seemed to be excessive usage of the internal ssd and this appeared to be down to a lot of memory swapping where data in the memory is temporarily moved to the ssd to free up resources and then load it back in as required then later reports began to surface of even more extreme ssd usage the worst of which seemed to be tens of terabytes of data written in a matter of weeks and this is a concern because ssds have a finite lifespan and every time you write some data that lifespan reduces a little and this is a bigger concern when you've got a computer like the mac where the ssd is soldered to the motherboard i made a number of videos at the time and if you want to know more technical detail i've set up a playlist with all of the m1 ssd content but now here we are six months on and there still aren't any widespread reports of drive failures in m1 machines in fact hardly any of the tech outlets are talking about this issue at all so has the problem gone away did it even exist in the first place here are my final thoughts and i do have something interesting to share just to be clear at the outset i've always said that the vast majority of m1 users do not need to worry the ssd in your m1 mac will almost certainly outlast other key components in the machine now it turns out that there are a number of things which can cause a higher than normal amount of data writing to the ssd and it seems that the most extreme cases occurred when all of these things were happening simultaneously but before we run through those things it's important to state that users only knew about this activity because of third-party reporting software like smart mon tools and that software could be reporting things incorrectly different vendors implement smart in different ways apple doesn't provide a tool specific to their ssd so we can't be 100 certain that the figures reported by the tool are actually an accurate representation of what's going on i did a video that explains how ssds work and why this might be the case again that's in that playlist i mentioned but let's assume that m1 does write to the ssd much more than expected what's the cause well partly it's that memory swapping behavior that we mentioned of course all computers do this but the m1 seems to do it more than the previous intel max especially that 8 gigabyte m1 model and that's not really a surprise because the m1 shares its memory between the cpu the gpu and all of those machine learning cores it's completely fine for regular day-to-day computing but the m1 is such a powerful chip that a lot of people aren't using these entry-level machines for just day-to-day computing add in all the youtube hype and you've got a lot of users pushing these machines very hard in pro level apps because they can do it but eight gigabytes is a little bit light for these scenarios and so inevitably you end up with a lot of memory swapping the second reason for those high data rights seem to be connected with a bug in rosetta that's the software that's used to translate intel or x86 apps to apple silicon and we conducted a survey to try and gather some usage data to see if we could see any patterns to this and we did get some insights and it seemed that x86 games and x86 adobe apps were big culprits of course we're not professional statisticians and with the benefit of hindsight we can see how we might have gathered the data in a different way to get some more usable results and it's fair to say that we didn't list every possible app so please don't interpret this as some sort of finger pointing adobe or game developers as time has progressed many of those apps now have native apple silicon versions and it's possible that apple was quietly fixing the issues without admitting anything naturally it certainly does seem that apple has made some specific quiet fixes that are part of the mac os 11.4 release something else that we found in the data was those who are experiencing these excessive data rights were often google chrome users i'm not saying google chrome was entirely responsible of course but chrome has always been the butt of jokes in the web development industry for being a bit of a memory hog um that's probably not true anymore but i did do some testing and i found that chrome was writing or caching a lot of data to the ssd when it was streaming video something that safari and edge didn't do this drive caching behavior can be switched off but many users might not know to do that and i also think it's entirely possible that some users were downloading the intel version by mistake so long days spent watching youtube would quickly add to that data written particularly if chrome was running through rosetta it also turns out that even if you're not a chrome user you might still be using apps with chrome embedded a subscriber of the channel ian gao reached out to me about a month ago with a bit of a discovery he's got a 16 gig m1 mac mini with a 512 gig ssd and he is still seeing what he calls ludicrous mode disk writing activity 136 terabytes written to date and he's using mac os 11.5 so it seems not all of the issues are yet fixed and this is an interesting insight ian did some investigating and what he noticed was something called nwjs helper in his activity monitor and this is a package of tools that's necessary for apps that are built in nw.js a javascript framework nothing sinister about that at all what you noticed was that there was a renderer process attached to this consuming 29 gigabytes of ram in a machine with 16 gigs of ram it's inevitable then that some if not most of that memory usage is being written to the ssd and it's easy to see how that could add up in ian's case he saw 15 terabytes written to the ssd in just two days and as soon as he killed the process that ridiculous disk activity stopped human belief that the renderer is related to chrome even though he was using safari and firefox and that's because many apps come with chrome or other tools for providing web views embedded into the code and that raised another question is the embedded code optimized for m1 i put that question to ian and he kindly did some more research and he found that it is indeed an intel or x86 application in fact he noticed other helper apps and processes that are also intel binaries whilst the main source code of some apps may be apple silicon optimized some of the third-party libraries that they rely on may not be and this certainly explains a lot ian hasn't actually managed to figure out which app is launching this process and i've never seen anything like it on my m1 mac but this may be a helpful pointer to others who are still seeing these high data rights so is the problem fixed well i think it's difficult to give a straight answer to that i suspect there are many processes like the one we just talked about that when they're being translated by rosetta somehow managed to consume ram and that in turn results in memory swapping and excessive disk writing but i expect that as these individual apps are rewritten for apple silicon the issue will obviously go away as i've said before apple or rather the company and engineers that apple bought really know how to make ssds and there are no wide reports of ssd failures in either m1 max or intel max consider the health data for ian's sst it suggests that his is only five percent worn and it still has all of its available spare capacity and remember that an ssd doesn't immediately fail when it gets uh reporting a hundred percent used that's the minimum warranty expectancy that the manufacturer says the actual expectancy could be considerably more this transition to apple silicon is a huge undertaking anyone buying these early m1 machines should expect that there will be teething issues and this is just one of them so my final conclusion is this yes i think there has been an issue and i think the software tools are reporting correctly i think there is a tiny proportion and i do mean tiny who will see their ssd fail earlier than expected but the vast majority won't have a problem i believe the ssds in these macs are very good and probably use various types of caching and cell emulation to cater for all of this swap activity because it's part of the m1s design and as a result i don't think we need to worry ourselves and time seems to be bearing that out famous last words so my advice is to keep your m1 mac up to date with the latest version of mac os and just keep an eye on things but please don't worry about it enjoy your rather brilliant m1 computer i hope you enjoyed this video thanks in advance for all of your likes shares and subs and let me know your thoughts in the comments section and i'll see you next time for some more geekery youback in february of 2021 m1 mac users started to notice what seemed to be excessive usage of the internal ssd and this appeared to be down to a lot of memory swapping where data in the memory is temporarily moved to the ssd to free up resources and then load it back in as required then later reports began to surface of even more extreme ssd usage the worst of which seemed to be tens of terabytes of data written in a matter of weeks and this is a concern because ssds have a finite lifespan and every time you write some data that lifespan reduces a little and this is a bigger concern when you've got a computer like the mac where the ssd is soldered to the motherboard i made a number of videos at the time and if you want to know more technical detail i've set up a playlist with all of the m1 ssd content but now here we are six months on and there still aren't any widespread reports of drive failures in m1 machines in fact hardly any of the tech outlets are talking about this issue at all so has the problem gone away did it even exist in the first place here are my final thoughts and i do have something interesting to share just to be clear at the outset i've always said that the vast majority of m1 users do not need to worry the ssd in your m1 mac will almost certainly outlast other key components in the machine now it turns out that there are a number of things which can cause a higher than normal amount of data writing to the ssd and it seems that the most extreme cases occurred when all of these things were happening simultaneously but before we run through those things it's important to state that users only knew about this activity because of third-party reporting software like smart mon tools and that software could be reporting things incorrectly different vendors implement smart in different ways apple doesn't provide a tool specific to their ssd so we can't be 100 certain that the figures reported by the tool are actually an accurate representation of what's going on i did a video that explains how ssds work and why this might be the case again that's in that playlist i mentioned but let's assume that m1 does write to the ssd much more than expected what's the cause well partly it's that memory swapping behavior that we mentioned of course all computers do this but the m1 seems to do it more than the previous intel max especially that 8 gigabyte m1 model and that's not really a surprise because the m1 shares its memory between the cpu the gpu and all of those machine learning cores it's completely fine for regular day-to-day computing but the m1 is such a powerful chip that a lot of people aren't using these entry-level machines for just day-to-day computing add in all the youtube hype and you've got a lot of users pushing these machines very hard in pro level apps because they can do it but eight gigabytes is a little bit light for these scenarios and so inevitably you end up with a lot of memory swapping the second reason for those high data rights seem to be connected with a bug in rosetta that's the software that's used to translate intel or x86 apps to apple silicon and we conducted a survey to try and gather some usage data to see if we could see any patterns to this and we did get some insights and it seemed that x86 games and x86 adobe apps were big culprits of course we're not professional statisticians and with the benefit of hindsight we can see how we might have gathered the data in a different way to get some more usable results and it's fair to say that we didn't list every possible app so please don't interpret this as some sort of finger pointing adobe or game developers as time has progressed many of those apps now have native apple silicon versions and it's possible that apple was quietly fixing the issues without admitting anything naturally it certainly does seem that apple has made some specific quiet fixes that are part of the mac os 11.4 release something else that we found in the data was those who are experiencing these excessive data rights were often google chrome users i'm not saying google chrome was entirely responsible of course but chrome has always been the butt of jokes in the web development industry for being a bit of a memory hog um that's probably not true anymore but i did do some testing and i found that chrome was writing or caching a lot of data to the ssd when it was streaming video something that safari and edge didn't do this drive caching behavior can be switched off but many users might not know to do that and i also think it's entirely possible that some users were downloading the intel version by mistake so long days spent watching youtube would quickly add to that data written particularly if chrome was running through rosetta it also turns out that even if you're not a chrome user you might still be using apps with chrome embedded a subscriber of the channel ian gao reached out to me about a month ago with a bit of a discovery he's got a 16 gig m1 mac mini with a 512 gig ssd and he is still seeing what he calls ludicrous mode disk writing activity 136 terabytes written to date and he's using mac os 11.5 so it seems not all of the issues are yet fixed and this is an interesting insight ian did some investigating and what he noticed was something called nwjs helper in his activity monitor and this is a package of tools that's necessary for apps that are built in nw.js a javascript framework nothing sinister about that at all what you noticed was that there was a renderer process attached to this consuming 29 gigabytes of ram in a machine with 16 gigs of ram it's inevitable then that some if not most of that memory usage is being written to the ssd and it's easy to see how that could add up in ian's case he saw 15 terabytes written to the ssd in just two days and as soon as he killed the process that ridiculous disk activity stopped human belief that the renderer is related to chrome even though he was using safari and firefox and that's because many apps come with chrome or other tools for providing web views embedded into the code and that raised another question is the embedded code optimized for m1 i put that question to ian and he kindly did some more research and he found that it is indeed an intel or x86 application in fact he noticed other helper apps and processes that are also intel binaries whilst the main source code of some apps may be apple silicon optimized some of the third-party libraries that they rely on may not be and this certainly explains a lot ian hasn't actually managed to figure out which app is launching this process and i've never seen anything like it on my m1 mac but this may be a helpful pointer to others who are still seeing these high data rights so is the problem fixed well i think it's difficult to give a straight answer to that i suspect there are many processes like the one we just talked about that when they're being translated by rosetta somehow managed to consume ram and that in turn results in memory swapping and excessive disk writing but i expect that as these individual apps are rewritten for apple silicon the issue will obviously go away as i've said before apple or rather the company and engineers that apple bought really know how to make ssds and there are no wide reports of ssd failures in either m1 max or intel max consider the health data for ian's sst it suggests that his is only five percent worn and it still has all of its available spare capacity and remember that an ssd doesn't immediately fail when it gets uh reporting a hundred percent used that's the minimum warranty expectancy that the manufacturer says the actual expectancy could be considerably more this transition to apple silicon is a huge undertaking anyone buying these early m1 machines should expect that there will be teething issues and this is just one of them so my final conclusion is this yes i think there has been an issue and i think the software tools are reporting correctly i think there is a tiny proportion and i do mean tiny who will see their ssd fail earlier than expected but the vast majority won't have a problem i believe the ssds in these macs are very good and probably use various types of caching and cell emulation to cater for all of this swap activity because it's part of the m1s design and as a result i don't think we need to worry ourselves and time seems to be bearing that out famous last words so my advice is to keep your m1 mac up to date with the latest version of mac os and just keep an eye on things but please don't worry about it enjoy your rather brilliant m1 computer i hope you enjoyed this video thanks in advance for all of your likes shares and subs and let me know your thoughts in the comments section and i'll see you next time for some more geekery you\n"
